


The One Where Jesse Likes Vegetarians [December 1, 2012]

by patchfire, raving_liberal



Series: Story of Three Boys/Rambling Wrecks AUs [4]
Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Serial Killers, Strangulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-07 06:10:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1116434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patchfire/pseuds/patchfire, https://archiveofourown.org/users/raving_liberal/pseuds/raving_liberal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Killers Week AU spinning off from the middle of "Put On Your Yarmulkes".</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Not a new work. We're migrating the AUs away from the SOTB series and into their own, so we can get the odd tags and pairings off the SOTB series tags!
> 
> **Warning: This story contains character death and other disturbing material**! Please read the [expanded warnings](http://storyof3boys.livejournal.com/102889.html) for Killers Week. 
> 
> This is the single most requested death in all of the SOTB/RW 'verse...

Jesse likes vegetarians. For some reason, it makes the killing part feel almost ironic, or maybe it’s not actually ironic. He’s never been sure about the correct use of that word, but since he doesn’t talk about the killing part with anyone, he never has to justify his word choice. It’s one of the perks, really.

He meets Rachel for dinner at Maoz. She arrives in a pink puffy coat that makes her look like a sweet marshmallow angel, a little cream-colored wool beret perched on top of her shiny hair. He kisses her on each cheek, and they don’t really have time for conversation until they’re settled into their seats, Rachel’s pink coat dangling from the back of her chair. 

“You look beautiful,” Jesse tells her. 

“Thank you!” Rachel says, beaming across the table at Jesse. “I was in the park earlier.”

“And what fun that must have been,” Jesse says. “Now, tell me all about your week.”

He doesn’t really listen as she launches into a detailed description of everything she’s been doing, her self-imposed practice schedule to continually challenge herself vocally, and a lot about shopping. He watches her white teeth flashing, the way she tosses her hair and touches her neck while she drones on and on about the instructors she hopes to have in next semester’s classes and her plans for travel back to Lima for winter break. When she starts to talk about being in the park with Kurt and Noah, however, Jesse tunes back in.

“Kurt… Hummel? From McKinley?” Jesse asks. 

“Yes, of course, and you remember Noah, too,” she insists. 

Jesse doesn’t remember any Noah, but nods anyway with a tight-lipped smile. “Did you mention me to them?” he asks. 

“Of course!” Rachel tells him. “Just that we’d seen each other a few days ago. I don’t think they were that interested in catching up with you, though,” Rachel says apologetically, frowning. “They’re both so busy, I guess. Kurt’s at Marymount Manhattan and Noah’s at Mannes, and while neither of those is as prestigious as Juilliard, I imagine they’re still a challenge.”

“Hmm.” Jesse nods again in acknowledgment. The last thing he needs is someone putting the pieces together, not when he still has so much work left to do. “Did you mention to them where we were meeting?”

“Oh, no, they didn’t seem that interested in that, either.” She frowns again. “Somewhere they were going. I can’t remember.”

“You should call them or text them after dinner to tell them you had a lovely time and are on your way back to your dorm,” Jesse suggests. “So they don’t think you’re that kind of girl.” He puts his hand on top of Rachel’s on the table and strokes the back of her wrist with his fingertips. 

Rachel giggles. “You’re right, of course. I always said you were smart!”

“I am,” Jesse agrees, catching her gaze and holding it steadily. “I also hope you might be.”

“Be what?” Rachel asks, still giggling. 

“That kind of girl. With me.” He smiles at her slowly. “Tonight.”

“Oh.” Rachel actually blushes, lowering her eyes for a moment. “You have your own place?”

“I sublease from a baritone understudy who’s traveling with _Book of Mormon_ ,” Jesse confides. “It’s small, but it has a street view.”

“Ooh. That sounds lovely. My dorm room – well, it’s so small, but we’re required to live in the dorms the first year.”

“I’m sure that won’t be a problem next year,” Jesse promises her. “Let’s order our dinner to go.”

She beams. “That sounds lovely.”

She calls her friends from outside the restaurant like a good girl and assures them she’s safely on her way back to her dorm, and then they walk to the subway. They take the train two stops past where they should get off, then a bus four blocks back up, past his apartment, so that when they walk the final blocks, Rachel looks confused, like she can’t place herself within the city. He taught himself this trick after the first girl, the one in Los Angeles. 

After they’re inside the apartment, he helps her with her pink coat. “Make yourself comfortable,” Jesse instructs her. “I’ll be right back.”

“Okay!” Rachel smiles, smoothing her sweater.

Jesse walks into the bedroom. After he ran into Rachel and they talked over coffee, he had returned to his apartment to prepare his bedroom, stripping off his high thread count sheets and replacing them with the generic white hotel sheets, cheap waterproof mattress cover underneath. He hates the crinkly plastic and the scratch of the bleached linens against his skin while he makes love to the girls, but the sheets are unremarkable and disposable, so it’s a necessary sacrifice. He double-cases the pillows, and leaves the spare case in the bedside table drawer with condoms and his other tools.

Walking back into the main room, Jesse announces, “And now we should eat!”

“It was so thoughtful of you to select a vegetarian restaurant, Jesse,” Rachel says to him. “I do appreciate it.”

“A small sacrifice,” Jesse assures her. “Besides, this is excellent.” 

After dinner, he takes her back to the bedroom, where he makes slow, tender love to her, wearing a condom, of course. When she’s flushed and limp against the pillows, a beautiful smile on her face, he reaches into the bedside table drawer and puts on his gloves. 

“Jesse?” Rachel looks confused. “What are you doing?”

“Shh. It’s nothing to worry about. Just close those beautiful eyes.” 

She’s such a good girl, not like the first girl in New York, who kept asking question after question until Jesse had to shove a sock into her mouth. Rachel isn’t like that, though. She closes her eyes, her long lashes casting shadows on her cheeks, and he strokes her hair with his gloved hands before he slips the spare pillowcase over her head. She doesn’t even struggle, just giggles like a perfect angel, like she understands it’s all a game. 

When Jesse twines the generic nylon rope around her neck, over the pillowcase, she does start to move, but he tightens it quickly enough that she doesn’t make a peep. He sits on top of her, holding her down while she kicks, and continues to tighten the rope until the kicking stops. The killing part doesn’t take long; it never does. That’s the only downside of this, really, that he can’t make it last without the risk of making it noisy. 

“This was a lovely evening, Rachel,” Jesse says to Rachel’s still body. “Thank you.”

He wraps her in the fitted sheet, removing the rope, but leaving the pillowcase, then he gathers up the rest of the sheets, the two pillowcases from each pillow, the plastic mattress cover, and tosses in the used condom and his gloves. He’ll burn it all later, after he moves the body. 

Jesse folds Rachel’s body up into a ball and lifts her into the large rolling suitcase he’d purchased at a thrift store at the other end of the city. In the morning, during rush hour, he’ll dispose of the suitcase in Penn Station, where it will sit until the end of the morning rush.

He remakes his bed with his regular mattress cover and his high thread count sheets, and lies down in his bed. He’ll sleep soundly tonight, just like he does after a particularly good night on stage. In this, as in theatre, he can tell when he has turned in an excellent performance.


	2. The One Who Doesn't Get Away With It

Penn Station is Jesse’s undoing. 

He doesn’t account for the cameras. It’s a funny thing, given his profession, that he doesn’t think about cameras, but he doesn’t, and they catch him rolling the suitcase into the station. They don’t get a full shot of his face, only part of one side, not even his good side, but with the other information they have, it’s apparently enough.

She did send the text to her friends as she left the restaurant, just like Jesse told her, but apparently all that did was make them suspicious. Her absence was noticed quickly, and Kurt and Noah—whom Jesse still doesn’t remember, despite Rachel’s insistence that he should have—waste no time in calling the police and telling them everything they know. Jesse so loved the little rituals he had developed to dispose of his girls, and he thought they were so creative and clever, the clean-up so thorough, but in the end, all he did was make the the four murders across two states easy to connect. 

Three days after Jesse leaves Rachel in Penn Station, the police get a warrant to enter his sublet apartment. Jesse is at rehearsal, so he isn’t there when they find the supplies in his bedside table. He doesn’t watch them pull Rachel’s puffy pink coat from where it’s been stuffed, forgotten, underneath the sofa. He doesn’t see them dusting for prints and finding a perfect set of Rachel’s, including thumb, on the glass top of the coffee table. He doesn’t know they’ve talked to the staff at Maoz, who confirmed that yes, they had seen that woman in the restaurant, and yes, she was accompanied by a tall man with dark hair; if he had known, he would have imagined they described him as having a rakish smile, when in reality, they describe him as having crazy eyes. 

He’s arrested in the middle of a run-through of “Money, Money, Money” and he assures his fellow cast members and the director that he’ll be right back. He won’t be. Jesse’s Broadway career ends that day, though it’s 27 months before a jury reaches a verdict for “the Broadway Strangler,” as the papers start calling him: guilty, of course. 

In another twist of irony—though again, Jesse isn’t precisely sure if it’s actually _irony_ or not—Rachel’s friends Kurt and Noah (no, he never did figure out why he should know him) eventually write a musical about the Broadway Strangler. It wins awards in nearly every Tonys category in which it’s nominated, and in a way, Jesse feels like that makes him a Tony winner, too.


End file.
